About Dry Grasses: Misanthropic Turkish Teacher Learns a Lesson, Maybe
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Since Distant, his 2002 third feature won the Grand Prize at Cannes, the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been one of the most celebrated auteurs of the current century. His protagonists struggle with loneliness and meaning against the background of Turkey’s class, geographical, and political divides.
Films such as 2011’s chilly policier Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and 2015’s funereal Winter Sleeps are major works, though there have also been less rewarding efforts, such as 2006’s Climates and 2007’s Three Monkeys.
And now, there’s About Dry Grasses. Since the film had its debut at Cannes last year, it has received many glowing reviews from respected critics though after watching the film twice now, I have doubts. It feels unbalanced, a collection of often-compelling sequences stitched together in a way that is unpersuasive or sometimes simply puzzling.
The film is a portrait of a bachelor art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu) in the last year of a four-year contract, who faces allegations of inappropriate behaviour with a 14-year-old student, Sevim (Ece Bagci). Early in the film, we see him give a small trinket to the girl when he returns from winter break, as he briefly hugs her around the shoulders. In class, when other students complain that he consistently calls on her in class, he angrily shuts them up.
When another teacher discovers a love letter in Sevim’s school bag, Samet wastes no time getting hold of the note. When the tearful and humiliated girl demands it back, Samet lies and says he has torn it up, but it’s clear to her he has read the contents.
Subsequently, he’s summoned to the director of education’s office. Two girls have complained about unwanted touching by Samet and his introverted roommate, a fellow teacher named Kenan (Musab Ekici). Samet’s response is less than contrite. He orders the tearful Sevim to get out of his class and tells the other students they’ll never be artists and aren’t fit for anything more than farming.
The accusation is much discussed but appears to be shut down with no real consequences. It does causes Samet to step out of his comfort zone. A military commander friend warns Samet that “You’re always hanging out with the wrong people.” So, Samet goes on a blind date with another teacher, Nuray (Merve Dizdar).
Nuray has returned to her hometown from Ankara, where she lost her lower right leg in the 2015 terrorist bombing at a pro-Kurdish peace march. At first, Samet is not particularly interested in her, but when she shows friendly affection toward his roommate Kenan, his competitive urge is triggered. He sets out to seduce her by leaving Kenan out of a planned group dinner at her house.
The dinner argument/conversation, with its shifting lighting and careful compositions, is the heightened set-piece of the film. During a long evening argument over wine, the man and woman argue about commitment versus detachment. Nuray challenges his selfishness and avoidance of political responsibility.
Actor Dizdar — who has a face that reveals changing feelings like an emotional seismograph — is no more optimistic than Samet, but braver. “Can this wretched world be helped?” she asks. “That’s the only question.”
Later, she has another terrific scene when she goes to the two men’s house and addresses the roommate Kenan, who has attempted to ghost her because he felt betrayed. It’s an inspiring moment when she calls out two men as if they were bickering surly schoolboys and demands they act like decent adults.
At 197 minutes, About Dry Grasses is stretched out with interior scenes of circular conversations, outdoor scenes of snowy landscapes, including still photographs (Samet is an amateur photographer) of local people and the stark landscape.
As Martin Scorsese said in defense of the similar running time for Killers of the Flower Moon, “I say this to the audience out there, if there is an audience for this kind of thing: ‘Make a commitment. Your life might be enriched.’”
Still, it’s not clear that all About Dry Grass’ running time is productive. There’s a brief, baffling scene when Samet goes to a bathroom at Nuray’s house in which the director suddenly breaks the fourth wall and walks through on a vast film soundstage, wandering past the crew.
Ordinarily, you might assume the sequence is intended, in a Brechtian sense, to rupture identification with the character, though Samet isn’t really any protagonist you’re likely to identify with and the sequence, like a television ad in a program, feels irrelevant.
At the end of the film, the director tips the scales in the other direction, encouraging direct identification by introducing Samet, reaching the end of his teaching term, speaking in voice-over to offer a backward glance at his experience. It’s a chance to review the lessons learned and his new appreciation of these frustrating rural locals he equates with “dry yellow grasses” who, by the time they hit middle age, will feel the “desert inside.”
Is this actually a moment representing Samet’s new all-embracing compassionate vision as the film’s champions claim? Or perhaps something much less dignified? In his final soliloquy, Samet’s thoughts are focused entirely on the adolescent girl Sevim, who is conjured up in memory in a playful teacher versus student snowball fight.
Samet recalls how he “dreamed of the impossible” and ponders on “the distance too cruel for our consciousnesses to approach.”
Let’s assume the best, that she is a representative figure of the innocent common folk that an urban intellectual such as himself feels so remote from and wishes he could bridge the gap. But really — a snowball fight with the teacher’s pet?
About Dry Grasses. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylon. Written by Akin Aksu, Erbu Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Starring Deniz Celiloglu, Merve Dizdar, Musab Ekici and Ece Bagci. In theatres March 1 in Toronto (TIFF Lightbox), Ottawa (ByTowne Cinema), and Vancouver (VIFF Centre); March 8 in Waterloo (Princess Cinemas) and Edmonton (Edmonton City Centre); and March 29 in Kingston (The Screening Room) with additional markets to be announced.